But Huffman said Reddit was now battling to ensure its users stay at the center of the social network. “Where the rest of the internet seems to be powered by or written by or summarized by AI, Reddit is distinctly human,” he said. “It’s the place you go when you want to hear from people, their lived experiences, their perspectives, their recommendations. Reddit is communities and human curation and conversation and authenticity.”
As Reddit becomes an increasingly important source for LLMs, advertisers are responding with what one agency chief described as a “massive migration” to the platform.
Multiple advertising and agency executives speaking during this month’s Cannes advertising festival told the FT that brands were increasingly exploring hosting a business account and posting content on Reddit to boost the likelihood of their ads appearing in the responses of generative AI chatbots.
I’m wondering if advertisers are starting to notice - that’s the only thing that’ll make these fuckers try to clean house. It’s maybe two years since I left reddit and even then it was absolutely infested with bots. They didn’t give a fuck, only cared about the IPO. But advertisers are going to care when they get lots of engagement but no customers because all the engagement is bots.
Do they have a way to test that? Surely the advertisers wouldn’t just trust meta, google, reddit, etc.
I’ve worked on some enterprise projects specifically to detect bot activity, so that they wouldn’t waste ML resources on a fake customer. While it’s a bit of a cat and mouse game, they can certainly review past data for their advertising campaign and the conversion rates they are getting in order to determine if reddit ads are worth the money
That’s good to hear, I hope they have many fights about it.